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• Congress Hotel strike hits 5th year June 12, 2008 Before his daily turn on the 6 a.m. shift, Jose Sanchez tries to bury his worries. He looks forward to joining fellow union members who have been marching the same short picket line in front of the Congress Hotel for the last five years.
  
  
• Union contract is signed June 4, 2008 NORTHWEST GLENDALE - Workers at the Hilton Glendale on Wednesday signed a groundbreaking, five-year union contract with hotel managers two years after calling for a community boycott to bring attention to their cause.
  
  
• Councilmen to boycott hotel May 1, 2008 Three members of the Baltimore City Council yesterday agreed to sign a boycott commitment against a downtown hotel that has been involved in a long-standing battle with the union representing its employees.
  
  

UNITE HERE represents about 100,000 workers in hotels like Hilton, Marriott and Hyatt across the U.S. and Canada . Ownership in the hotel industry is concentrated in the hands of a few national and international companies, making it important for hotel workers across the U.S. and Canada to concentrate, too. To this end, hotel workers in New York, Chicago, Boston, Toronto and Honolulu, among other cities, all negotiated contracts that expire in 2006 so that they can stand together against large corporations.

Contracts that cover nearly 16,000 workers are expiring this year in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. In addition to working together to win wage increases and other improvements, one of our central goals is winning a two-year term so that these workers can join the over 40,000 hotel workers who will be negotiating together in 2006.

By uniting hotel workers across North America, we will be able to take on many of the issues that matter most to us—winning affordable health care, respecting immigrant workers' rights and hiring African American workers. The specifics of wages and other benefits will continue to be hammered out locally.

Many hotel companies are growing through new construction, so we're challenging companies to respect workers' rights by agreeing to a card-check recognition process. Since 1997, 12,000 new hotel workers have joined our ranks. And since 2002, we've won agreements in 15 future hotel projects that will employ about 5,000 workers. Some recent victories include right-to-organize agreements for an 800-room Hilton in Baltimore, Md.; a 1,000-room Hyatt in Denver, Colo. and an 800-room Hilton in Osceola County, Fla.

With about one million hotel workers in the U.S. and Canada, we've got a lot of organizing to do. Hotel workers make strangers welcome and comfortable. Their hard should be rewarded with decent pay and benefits, with enough to provide their own children with a bright future. That's what belonging to UNITE HERE is all about.